5. Addie
ADDIE
PARAMORE – FENCES
“Now, how would one know if they’ve tripped a silent alarm system when breaching a secured network?
” Evander Lockwood asked from where he stood at the front of the classroom.
He was asking the cohort as a whole, but no one deigned to answer, and somehow, his eyes kept coming back to land on my ever-reddening face.
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with having seen me naked an hour ago.
Not at all.
I didn’t think I could sink further into my seat if I tried, much to Fleur’s evident amusement. She snickered as I dropped lower, my head surely now completely hidden by the blank laptop screen in front of me.
If I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me, right?
The last ten minutes had passed like watching paint dry in live action—agonisingly slowly, and disintegrating my will to live—all of them spent dodging questions and glances from the man who’d just witnessed my… mortification.
Glancing at the clock on the wall again, I winced, convinced it was faulty and that more than twenty seconds had to have passed since I’d last checked it.
Lockwood sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Really? You graduate in six months, and none of you can answer this yet? Excuse me if I find that hard to believe.” His sharp stare flicked over all the blank faces in the room, none of whom had any real aptitude for espionage of the cyber variety.
His disappointment was almost palpable—and then his ultramarine gaze landed right back on me.
Shocker.
The fluorescents played tricks on me as I stared back, convincing me that there were actual oceans in his irises, rolling and meandering back and forth as he tilted his head.
I inhaled deeply, preparing an answer to his question, when he spoke again, shifting last- second to the girl on my left.
“Deveaux.”
Fleur jerked, and my head whipped around to stare at her, almost as startled as she was. Her lazy smirk dropped out of sheer panic, and her fingers fidgeted with the lip of her desk as she straightened like she’d just been caught passing notes in high school.
“How do you know if you’ve tripped a silent alarm?” he asked again.
The rest of the class twisted in their seats to stare at her too—the daughter of a biotech company’s CEO and founder. If anyone should know the answer, it ought to be her.
Unfortunately for Fleur, her brain wasn’t wired like her mother’s, and she floundered, blinking SOS at me in Morse code.
“The patterns change,” I said before I could talk myself out of diverting attention my way.
Fleur mouthed a quick thank you before I turned away to face the consequences of that generosity.
Lockwood’s gaze crashed back into mine with a force so intense it was almost tangible. He slowly raised a solitary brow over the rim of his circular glasses, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back to park his ass against his desk. Not that I was thinking about his ass. “Explain.”
“There’s no one-size-fits-all way to know if you’ve been detected, but you can hazard an educated guess by noticing the subtle anomalies.”
I felt Ethan’s hard stare pressing into my right cheek as I blushed furiously. I hated that I was so undone by a little nudity and intellectual tango—and that my friends were absolutely going to tease the everloving fuck out of me for it later.
“Go on,” Lockwood prompted. His face brightened, the waves in his eyes churning harder, piercing mine in a way that felt even more revealing than the bathroom debacle had been.
“Unusual latency,” I explained drily. This was some first-year bullshit. “Unexpected access denials, or conversely, passwords that seem a little too easy to crack, which lead you in circles upon circles of utter fuckery.”
His lips twitched. “Good.” He pushed off the edge of the desk and clicked the remote I hadn’t noticed was tucked into the crook of his sweater-covered arm. The enormous screen at the front of the room flashed to life, depicting a green and black map—of what, I had no idea.
“Bad news, class: today is a multi-assessment day—”
He was interrupted by a chorus of groans.
My unwanted brethren provided the backing track—just now realising they’d been physically slaughtered on Devil’s Pass this morning, and were now being subjected to Lockwood’s idea of technological warfare—all in the effort to give us appropriate and earned assignments by Graduation.
I straightened, rubbing my frozen fingers together in an attempt to get them to defrost, and stared at the front screen.
While Lockwood waited for the others to shut the fuck up, I was already whirling through at least twenty different potential scenarios. Just as he inhaled, I worked it out.
It was a map… of Devil’s Pass. And all those blinking lights at the bottom left of the screen were us—mice, about to hack their way through a maze to see if we could retrieve the proverbial cheese.
Holy fuck.
Devil’s Pass had been the plan all along—it hadn’t been a consequential change of mind for Hunter Beckett. No, this had been planned. All three of them had worked together and plotted this with psychopathic precision. No way Evander Lockwood could have whipped this up during lunch hour.
“Your task today is to make your way through each level of the map. When you trip the silent alarms—and you will”—he smirked, eliciting a second, quieter round of groans—“it’ll be entirely up to you how you go about handling them. Identify which system you triggered, then find a way around it.”
He clicked his remote again, and each of our laptop screens blinked to life—neon green typeset awaiting our commands.
“The purpose of today’s assessment is to see how well you can manage setbacks and alerts while looking for a certain piece of information I’ve hidden somewhere within the mock system.
If you retrieve the info, it’s an automatic pass.
If you can stay within the system by the time the assessment ends, a marginal pass.
But…” Lockwood’s gaze passed over the myriad faces staring at him with varying levels of panic.
Once again, he landed on me, and his brows twitched when he registered that I wasn’t exhibiting anything other than sheer boredom.
“If the system catches you snooping—if it boots you out—instant fail,” he finished quietly.
I could practically smell the shit leaking out of their assholes.
“You have one hour. Go.”
Flurries of fingertips sped across the dozens of keyboards—a staccato symphony of plastic and pressure. Some were rapid-fire, interspersed with periods of silence like half a thought unfinished; others were slower, more fluent, like a continuous stream of consciousness.
I leaned back in my chair, ignoring Fleur’s alarmed glance and Ethan’s suspicious frown, simply shrugging at both.
They didn’t spare me another thought after that—they didn’t have time to. As I watched the blinking dots on the front screen make their way up the virtual Black Mountain, my theory was confirmed.
Several green dots made it all the way to the peak before blinking out and reappearing halfway back down the map. Mine remained flashing slowly, steadily at the base, like it had all the time in the world to do the impossible.
“FUCK,” Sebastos roared. His laptop flew across the room a second later, smashing into the wall beside Lockwood’s main screen. His green dot vanished from the top of the digital Sapphire Ridge, never to reappear.
Lockwood said nothing, just smiled to himself like he wasn’t the least bit surprised, and was rewarded by a subsequent boom—the sound of Seb slamming the door behind himself after storming out of the class.
When Eth cursed loudly a few minutes later, and another dot rerouted from the top left back down to the bottom, I knew he’d tripped one of the bigger alerts, effectively wiping his screen back to square one.
“How the fuck am I meant to get across that gap in the matrix?” he grumbled, twisting to glare at me again. “And why the fuck aren’t you even attempting to?”
My lips tugged up into a lazy grin, and I stretched my arms back behind my head, reclining further in the hard plastic seat. My shoulder wound grabbed painfully, and I hissed—karma for cocky indifference, I guess.
Eth smirked in response, cracked his knuckles, and began pounding his keyboard anew. “You’ll fail if you don’t even try, Ads.”
“Will I? He never said anything about not participating at all, just that attempting will field you one of three results: instant pass, instant fail, or a virtual wrestle to just make it through by the skin of your teeth.”
His fingers stilled, and his dark gaze clashed with mine. “Well, shit. You’re waiting it out until the hour’s up so you don’t have to spend as long wrestling to pass,” he guessed.
I relaxed into my seat and closed my eyes, having seen everything I needed to already. “Something like that.”
The minutes passed much quicker when I could ignore the handsome instructor’s keen stare.
Something about the persistent tapping of keys soothed me. I found myself drifting off, relaxing into the knowledge that I wouldn’t be woken by a bucket of ice water.
“Five minutes left,” Lockwood boomed across the room, startling me awake.
Perfect.
A collective surge of panic rushed through the initiates still remaining as blinking dots on virtual mountains—with mine still lazing about at the bottom. Their typing became frantic and sloppy, and dots started vanishing amid a crescendo of frustration.
My fingers flew across the keyboard with a casual ease, one keystroke merging into another like a melody. It was muscle memory, just swapping one set of keys out for another, less musical kind.
My dot vanished on the map, and I exhaled.
It reappeared beneath the visible map, in a layer no one else had seen—a read-only screen. An observation tunnel.
Lockwood’s head snapped round to mine, surprise evident in the lines of his brow. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, staring hard.
All the better to see me with, my thoughts trilled.